A request for some advice regarding nightshooting

[Denis]

As I get nearer to retiring the boss asked me into the office tonight with a proposition.

He wants me to take the new company courier Transit van into central london on a Saturday night. He wants photographs of it with notable London sights in the background, Tower bridge, The Tower itself,London Eye, Shard, St Pauls ect. Now i'm not worried about getting the photos, its getting them right first time. If I use my 35mm f1.8 prime or my Tokina 11-16mm f2.4 using a Tripod,what should I shoot at regarding shutter speeds and f numbers to capture the lights, and give that night time city look   ?

This is not something I would want to repeat !

After that he wants me to take the truck on one of our weekly runs to Geneva as a last trip special and take the same sort of thing only with our regular customers premises and the truck and trailer featured. Once I have nailed the van job, then this will be a right jolly for me as a last trip !

So, over to you ...

Edited February 19, 2020 by Denis

[Clicker]

Stravinsky does a lot of cityscapes at night Denis from what I have seen on the forum, though I'm sure many others have similar  experience.. why not drop him a pm  in case he misses this as he doesn't logon every week and he may get an email notification of a pm....

 I hope this isn't a ruse Denis to get you to keep working...under  guise of being the firm's publicity photographer.... and  I hope they are paying you to do it !!!

[Denis]

8 hours ago, Clicker said:

 

 I hope this isn't a ruse Denis to get you to keep working...under  guise of being the firm's publicity photographer.... and  I hope they are paying you to do it !!!

It isn't...and they are

[Ryewolf]

I've done a few night-time shots, if you're using a tripod I would set the camera to Aperture Priority (or the Nikon equivalent) which will take care of the shutter speed, as for F stops I've seen f8-f16 suggested and iso100 to keep the noise down. I would probably use both the 35mm f1.8 prime or Tokina 11-16mm f2.4. If you find that the skies/background is too bright I would switch to Manual Mode, keep the f stop and iso the same and increase the shutter speed. It all depends on how much ambient light you have...

[Clicker]

13 hours ago, Denis said:

It isn't...and they are

Good !!!!

[johntwo]

Both lenses will do a job and the 11-16mm will give you a good depth of field.  There's nothing worse than thinking that you've got the shot only to find that the back end is OOF.  However, depending on your view point, the 11-16mm will give some distortion. Can be quite dynamic for high end sports cars but that might not be what your boss wants.  The problem with night shots is that highlights (street lamps etc) will burn out and can take over the composition, particularly if you end up with a star burst effect.  To some degree, burned out highlights can be fettled in post but there, star bursts are harder to fettle than just a dot.  So unless you want to use a star burst as part of the composition, it would be worth keeping your aperture as wide as you can.  If there is a lot of highlight around it might be worth doubling up on the shots, exposing for the highlights in one and the the vehicle for the other (you can lift the shadows in post) and then combine the two in PS.  Finally use a tripod.  Hand held can look OK but if you crop or print large, you can sometimes see a degree of ghosting that at first sight didn't seem to be there.  Have fun.

Edited February 20, 2020 by johntwo

[Denis]

I dont have PS John, is there another way of combining two shots?

[johntwo]

I only know of two ways, blending and superimposing.  Blending usually needs specialist software which is availble as stand alone but there is also a built in algorythm within PS. (not sure about light room).  Superimposing can be done in one of two ways but your software needs to provide for layers. The first way is to overlay the main image on the hilight image and just cut through the top laye with an eraser tool.  Registration needs to be exact but you can achieve this by temporarilly reducing the opacity of the top layer slightly so that you can see the main attributes of the layer below.  The second way is merely to make selection of the properly exposed highlights, copy them (feathered to soften the sdges) and paste them onto the main image but this almost certainly also needs layers.  Depends on what the software you are using is capable of.  The darker it is, the harder it gets.  You might be able to avoid either by making your images in the twilight and then darkening the surround to make it look darker that it really is.  You might also use a hand held flash to paint the vehicle having exposed for any intruding hilights.  Whatever you decide on, the best advice might be to not go at it cold.  Go out and set up a couple of trials this W/E to get a feel for what's possible.

Edited February 21, 2020 by johntwo

[johntwo]

This is the sort of problem I had in mind Denis.  I was concentrating on the contrast between the artificial light in the belfry and the hard white of the building.  I failed to see the street lamp which ends up dominating.

[Denis]

Yes, I see what you mean. Thats helpful info, the only thing is i dont have any software that allows layers, I only have lightroom and Topaz !so i may have to just rely on straight shots. I will have a test run as the weather improves, there is no immediate hurry. I appreciate the advice though John, cheers

[Hatter]

Lightroom will do "merge to HDR" if you take multiple exposures of the same scene.

[johntwo]

Thanks Gareth.  That's what I would use in Photoshop.  Do you know the sequence of actions in Lightroom so that Denis can give it a try.

[Hatter]

In Lightroom, select all the images you want to merge, then from the menu, go to:   Photo > Photo Merge > HDR:

That then gives you this panel:

Tick "auto-align" (particularly if the photos were taken hand-held) and select "de-ghost" if there's anything in the photo that moved between frames.
Then click on "merge" and Lightroom creates a "super-raw" file with much more scope for adjusting shadows & highlights than a normal raw file.

 

[Clicker]

Gimp was free.. as far as  know it STILL is and though not as comprehensive as current Photoshop...it does use layers and there are lots of tutorials Denis

https://www.gimp.org/downloads/

...

 

[Stravinsky]

On 19/02/2020 at 22:31, Clicker said:

Stravinsky does a lot of cityscapes at night Denis from what I have seen on the forum, though I'm sure many others have similar  experience.. why not drop him a pm  in case he misses this as he doesn't logon every week and he may get an email notification of a pm....

 I hope this isn't a ruse Denis to get you to keep working...under  guise of being the firm's publicity photographer.... and  I hope they are paying you to do it !!!

Denis and I have been messaging, as I hadn't seen the post here until now

I usually use a 24-105 lens, 100 ISO around f11 in aperture priority on a tripod.    I often use an ND grad as well when the contrasts are quite great  - it might have helped with Johntwo's issue with the bright street lamp 

[JamesT]

9 hours ago, Clicker said:

Gimp was free.. as far as  know it STILL is and though not as comprehensive as current Photoshop...it does use layers and there are lots of tutorials Denis

https://www.gimp.org/downloads/

...

 

Is and always will be (GPL licence).

Another useful tool for that sort of thing might be Hugin. It's first and foremost a panorama stitcher, but also does HDR stacks.

http://hugin.sourceforge.net/